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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9387469" data-attributes="member: 6877472">It's interesting though, because I read the Monster Manual long before I ever got a chance to play the game.  I'd been curious for quite some time about Dungeons & Dragons- my first look at the books were at the Joliet Public Library, where they had the Monster Manual I, the Fiend Folio, and the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.  I was fascinated about the lore behind many of these strange creatures, and remained so ever since.I loved the Ecology of the X articles in Dragon, and this soon expanded to me becoming a lore junkie for a lot of things, not just D&D.  Whenever I play an adventure and we encounter a strange monster, it's fun for me to realize "Oh!  It's a Neo-Otyugh!" when my fellow players have no idea what it is, and they seem entertained when I share with them lore about creatures that, to them, are little more than a stat block.Ditto for little references to the deep lore of the game.  So I never felt that anyone's experience is anything other than enriched by reading monster books.  Oh sure, maybe there's some fringe benefit in knowing how to kill a Rakshasa or that the 4e Dracolich has a reaction stun it can use on anyone so foolish as to try and engage it in melee, but at this point, there are so many variations of classic monsters out there, from edition changes, variant stat blocks, and just DM's putting their designer hat on and fiddling with things that it's really nothing I would worry about.Would things have been different had I played the game before reading the books?  I can't say, but I can't say that it affected my sense of wonder- take the DMG for example.  Reading about the Rain of Colorless Fire or the Invoked Devastation, learning about who Bigby and Rary and Grazzt and Tasha were, and being fascinated by the wonderful magic items (many of which I would never, ever get to see in play, let alone own) made me fall in love with the game far more than if I'd never been exposed to such.One thing I lament today is how little players of the game seem to know about the worlds their characters interact with.  Not long ago, a player in my current gaming group exclaimed "what the heck is a Derro?" when our group encountered the mad, sad, bad little jerks.  I was happy to be able to explain their origins, going back to the Shaver Mystery stories.Or when some of my gamer friends talked about Baldur's Gate 3, and I was able to quickly explain little details they didn't understand, like why there were so many Tieflings running around from Elturel, or the history of the Githyanki that enhanced the experience for them.But that's a larger issue with the game and how it is evolved, that doesn't have much to do with the question I posed in this thread.</blockquote>

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